Why are UVM professors teaching less than they were 50 years ago?

UVM faculty workloads evolve as professors split time between teaching and researching

Feb. 6, 2013

In this 2008 file photo, Professor Nicole Phelps (left) lectures her United States History class on at the University of Vermont. Due to an increased emphasis on research, today's UVM faculty members spend less time teaching than they did 50 years ago. / EMILY NELSON, Free Press

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Free Press Staff Writer

When Malcolm Severance joined the University of Vermont economics faculty in 1953, he was expected to teach eight three-credit courses a year — four courses each semester, a load commonly referred to as “four and four.”

When David Shiman began his career in the College of Education in 1971, that was his teaching load, too — four and four.

Today, for tenure-track faculty at UVM, “four and four” is either a distant memory or no memory at all. Nobody on the tenure track teaches that much these days. There’s no university-wide standard, and practices vary among colleges, schools and departments. But the typical teaching load for a faculty member on “the tenure track” — that is, a faculty member either with permanent status (tenure) or under consideration for promotion to that status — currently is five courses a year (two and three, or three and two).

What happened? Do professors today work less than they did a half-century ago? Not necessarily.

One thing that happened is that UVM, like many other state universities, started getting more serious about doing research. The school on the Hill that was something akin to a liberal arts college back in the early ‘50s now bills itself as a “small research university” that aspires to pre-eminence in that class of academic institutions. And today, research commonly gets equal billing with teaching when it comes to setting faculty workloads.

Something else that happened is that UVM started hiring more non-tenure-track faculty — sometimes called “adjuncts” — to handle teaching duties. UVM’s Institutional Research office doesn’t have statistics for the ‘50s, but the faculty headcounts just over the last two decades are instructive:

In 2011, UVM had 588 full-time tenure-trackers, down 10.5 percent, but substantially more full-time non-tenure-trackers — 593, up 177 percent. Undergraduate enrollment that fall was 10,086, up 24 percent.

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Teaching-load expectations apparently changed in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as more federal research dollars came into the university. Moreover, as Patrick Hutton wrote in a chapter of UVM’s bicentennial history, “Younger members of the faculty, hired in great numbers during the 1960s, brought with them a professional bias in favor of their newly acquired academic specializations and their expertise in research.”

Severance, who later served as a member of the Board of Trustees, retired from the faculty in 1986. He recalls that even in 1969, when he was teaching in the business school, the standard instructional load was three and three, down from when he started.

By 1986, the typical teaching load in the College of Arts and Sciences — the biggest part of UVM’s educational enterprise — was five courses a year, same as now. That’s according to John Jewett, who retired as dean of Arts and Sciences in that year.

“The expectation in Arts and Sciences was that everyone would be involved in research and service and teaching,” Jewett said recently. “There were no exceptions for trade-offs. All scholars in Arts and Sciences were encouraged to take on all three areas.”

Triple duty

Teaching, research and service — these are still the main obligations of UVM’s tenure-track faculty members. The proportions can vary, but the Provost’s Office, through university spokesman Jeff Wakefield, provided this breakdown: “Most tenure track faculty’s workload is divided into these categories by percentage, with some variation: Teaching and advising: 40 percent; Research: 40 percent; Service: 20 percent.”

“A typical tenure track teaching load includes five courses per year; two one semester and three the next.”

Research is expected of all faculty, but it’s an especially pressing obligation of junior faculty who aspire to tenure. They generally come up for tenure in their sixth year, and their prospects for approval depend heavily on their research productivity, often reflected in publications.

“Service” can take many forms: membership on departmental, college or university committees, for example, or in professional organizations, or as public/community service.

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Most UVM faculty are on nine-month contracts. Each faculty member is expected to put together an annual work plan for review by the department chairperson. The plans are negotiable, but the chair is responsible for holding faculty members accountable and for ensuring that overall workloads across the department are equitable.

Sara Solnick, an associate professor and chair of economics, said standard teaching/research/service breakdown for members of her department is 45/45/10. She added that those proportions don’t necessarily translate into time spent. (“People work a lot more than 40 hours,” she said.) Rather, they’re used in making annual evaluations that serve as the basis for merit pay increases.

Mark Usher, associate professor and chair of classics, said every member of his department is on a committee of some sort that requires a good deal of service work. As for teaching, the standard load is five courses a year, he said, and senior and junior faculty all teach all levels of undergraduate courses.

“Nobody teaching five courses a year is devoting 40 percent to research,” Usher said. “No way ... Maybe the scientists are.” That teaching load is more likely to consume 80 percent of a classicist’s time, he said.

Teaching expectations vary somewhat among departments and schools. In the School of Business Administration, the standard teaching load is four courses a year for new faculty hoping to achieve tenure and for “research productive” faculty, and five courses for other tenure-track faculty.

In economics or chemistry, a course that enrolls 100 students or more counts as two course equivalents; in sociology, that threshold is 140 students.

The rise of research, and who's paying for it

The growth of research at UVM and other state universities was stoked by federal expenditures. From 1969 to 1990, annual National Science Foundation support for college and university research nationwide increased more than six-fold, to $1.3 billion; and support from the National Institutes of Health, the other big federal research funder, increased more than nine times, to $2.8 billion.

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The federal government remains the primary source of UVM’s funding for sponsored projects, which totaled $129,466,938 in Fiscal Year 2012, up from $102,920,050 a decade before. And the largest category of sponsored projects is research, which pulled in $89,886,796 in FY 12.

That’s about $90 million from external sources for research at UVM. Despite the institution-wide faculty research mandate, however, those research dollars are not evenly distributed — far from it. The research grants that come in are heavily in favor of the sciences.

By contrast, said former UVM president Dan Fogel, professor of English, “very few grants are available to humanities scholars.”

“Even the most celebrated humanities scholars (e.g., M. H. Abrams, author of a critical study, ‘The Mirror and the Lamp,’ listed by The Modern Library as one of the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century) do not garner the kind of continuous funding (e.g., ‘funded for 25 straight years by the NIH’) typical among highly productive researchers in the life and physical sciences,” Fogel wrote in an email.

Of course, humanities researchers don’t need to set up labs or buy equipment or hire technicians, Usher pointed out. “We’re like Lone Rangers,” he said, typically relying on annual professional-development stipends of about $1,200 to pay some of their research expenses.

The College of Medicine alone accounted for about two-thirds of UVM’s sponsored research dollars in FY 2012; the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, about 6 percent; and the College of Arts and Sciences, with the largest faculty of all, about 7 percent.

Some departments in Arts and Sciences accounted for no sponsored research grants at all that year. Yet faculty in those departments were still engaged in research. So, who was paying for all that research work?

UVM and its tuition-paying students.

UVM’s general fund pays the salaries of professors, salaries that support professors’ research obligations. Where does the revenue for UVM’s general fund come from? Tuition, mostly. Of UVM’s general fund revenue budget for Fiscal Year 2013 of $299,690,000, about 69 percent came from tuition from all students, undergraduate, graduate and medical.

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In other words, students are subsidizing not just the instruction they get from their professors, but the research many of those professors are doing as well. That’s as it should be, say advocates of the research-university model, because students benefit from the faculty’s research.

With a faculty engaged in research, the argument goes, students get more opportunities to do research themselves. But beyond that, a professor’s scholarly work is expected to enrich instruction. The resulting educational impact is perceived — and promoted — as a comparative advantage for a school seeking to lure undergraduates to a “research university.”

“Students attend such institutions in order to be taught by faculty who are active in advancing their disciplines, not simply in transmitting knowledge created by others,” Fogel wrote.

“You bring the scholarly spirit into the classroom,” Solnick said. “Students are interested in what I’m working on.”

Usher pointed out that undergraduates at prestigious private universities tend to see a lot more of graduate teaching assistants than do students at UVM, whose classes are more likely to be conducted by faculty teacher/scholars.

“Research is also central to keeping faculty members current” in their fields, Usher said. “Research has a way of keeping teachers attuned and sharp.”